An abattoir is the same as a slaughterhouse, a place where livestock are killed and turned into carcasses for the butcher. Both words, abattoir and slaughterhouse, have origins that reflect the brutal but effective method by which livestock were originally made into “dead-stock”: they were beaten over the head with a club. With abattoir that grisly fate is evident in the word’s Latin source, battuere, meaning to beat; in Medieval Latin, this word developed into battere, which Old French adopted as abattre, the added a at the beginning of the word being the French preposition meaning to. The verb abattre was then turned into the noun abattoir before being adopted by English in the early nineteenth century. Similarly, with slaughterhouse, the grisly fate of the butchered animal is evident in the Old English source of slaughter: slean, also meaning to beat. Words closely related to slaughter include onslaught, slay, and sledge (as in sledgehammer); words related to abattoir include battle, debate (literally meaning to beat down), and combat (literally meaning to battle together).